


A Day at the Western Air Temple

by Fraslis



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bonding, Friendship, Gen, bonding over stressful traumatic life experiences, can be seen as shippy but mostly just bonding, is "bonding over stressful traumatic life experiences" a tag, really it's just katara learning to like zuko, zuko is a good boy. a sad boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 23:59:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14200485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fraslis/pseuds/Fraslis
Summary: Katara and Zuko, learning to live around each other.





	A Day at the Western Air Temple

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this like,,,two years ago and it still holds up  
> Tiny me did some bomb-ass shit
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! <3

Zuko is a shadow, Katara decides. He sits and watches her, but does not speak and makes no sound when he arrives nor when he leaves.  
  
She’s in the kitchen when she decides this—the Western Air Temple had facilities that, despite being abandoned for a hundred years, still work quite well. Her second day of being watched is coming to an end, dinner in a pot over the fire, the sun’s rays barely reflecting against the cliff wall she can see out the window.  
  
Like clockwork, as she turns to add the final touches to the pot, Zuko slips out of the doorway he’s been standing in.  
  
Back down to the fountain, undoubtedly.  
  
So Katara takes the pot down alone, and there are thankful smiles and grateful touches and they sit around the campfire and talk and laugh and Zuko comes alive, speaking like he never does during the day. They all go to bed reluctantly and Katara, worn out from the day’s work, lays down her blankets and lets exhaustion overtake her. The last thing she sees is Zuko, knees up against his chest, staring into the fire.

 

She sleeps fitfully, memories of Yon Rha and her mother swirling in and out of her dreams until she can’t tell what happened and what didn’t, and when the weak sun peeks over the cliff and wakes Katara, she rises, and starts her day’s duties again.  
  
Her shadow is back. He arrives as she makes breakfast, like he did the two days before, and she sneaks glances at him as she hunts down proper ingredients.  
  
There are dark bags under his eyes, and his eyelids slip closed every once in a while, before he yanks them open and continues to watch her.  
  
He is gone by the time she finishes, and she finds him curled up on his blankets, eyes closed, but she can tell that he isn’t asleep, nor is he trying to look it. She wakes the others, and offers Zuko his bowl when he finally sits up.

He is again gone when she goes to clean the pot and organize their supplies again for the—well. Again.

She suspects he is out teaching Aang. Aang is learning quickly, she knows. This is likely the reason for Zuko’s new shadowing tendencies. She can imagine Aang practicing a single form again and again and again, grating against the forced repetition while Zuko silently fumes at how easy the Avatar grasps the concepts he’s fought to learn since he was a child.  
  
On the other hand, maybe Zuko is a bit less bitter than Katara was.  
  
Either way, he’s back just as she decides that someone needs to go out foraging again, when the sun is further up in the sky and they might be able to catch something.  
  
That someone won’t be Aang. She sighs. There’s laundry to do as well, and she is reluctant to delegate it to others. The fact that they wouldn’t do it is only one of her reasons.  
  
Her eye catches Zuko standing in the doorway again. Her eyebrow twitches. He’s there, and he’s tired, and so is she, but she’s willing to try to help.  
  
“Are you going to stand there, or are you going to help?” She hopes he wasn’t looking for gentleness, because she’s not sure she’s really capable of it right now. She can feel Zuko freeze in the doorway.  
Don’t act like you’ve been caught with your hand in the food bag, it’s not like you were trying to hide.  
  
She steps past him and picks up the bag of laundry.  
  
“Come on.”  
  
He follows her, still silent, all the way up to the forest above them, through the trees, to the river that she’s designated for washing. She lets the bag of clothes fall to the ground and finally looks at Zuko. She points at the bag.  
  
“There’s soap in there. Clean those, would you?” She doesn’t wait for him to nod or speak, instead starting around the clearing, looking for berries and roots and the homes of small creatures. “I’m going foraging. Yell if you need anything.” She pushes into the foliage and hears splashing from the creek.

 

She returns to the clearing with a nice selection of fresh ingredients and substantially less rope. The snares would sit until tomorrow, and hopefully there’d be some kind of fresh meat when she checked them.  
  
Zuko was wringing out the last pieces of laundry, and he hauled the bag of wet clothes up over his shoulder as Katara walked past. Their first stop is the kitchen—Katara finds dry places to store her findings, and then they continue down to a landing Katara had set up for laundry. Together, they hang the clothes on racks Katara had cobbled together, and they work through the laundry in silence.  
She was vaguely skeptical of Zuko’s fire-drying method, but after watching him carefully coax heat out of a flat bed of coals and evaporate the water out of the clothing, she decided that his method held substantially less risk than some others she could think of. She herself bent the water out of the clothing, into a pot nearby, where she could use it for other things, like refilling the waterskin that lived at her hip.  
  
The bending was cathartic and by the time the sun slipped out of sight, behind the giant rock shelf they lived under, she was in a better mood than she had been in the morning. She stretched, working out the tension from bending for such a long period of time. She patted Zuko on the shoulder, and the heat from the coals died down. He blinked and yawned.  
  
“Would you like to help with lunch?” He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, covered in soot, and grimaced. She bent some of the extra water from the pot and curled it around his hands, carrying the majority of the soot away, off the edge of the landing. She offered a hand and he took it with a smile.  
  
Zuko was a surprisingly good assistant, and lunch was done faster than she expected. They took it down to the fountain, and found their friends in a passionate discussion. It was forgotten the minute they arrived, but the good mood hovered in the air and colored their meal with a happy tone.  
  
It was a blessing that the heaviness of their mission didn’t interfere with mealtimes.

 

As the afternoon began to bleed into twilight, Katara often found herself practicing her bending forms. Something about the soft light lent itself to meditation and introspection, and she worked through the basic movements, feeling the tension of the day fade away. She could hear, in the distance, Aang and Zuko working on firebending—getting the most out of the day before the sun was gone and the firebending weakened.  
  
She was so lost within herself that she didn’t hear her shadow slip out onto the platform, and when he spoke, she reacted purely on defensive instinct, her water freezing into sharp points at his throat.  
“Sorry.” She pulled the water back into her waterskin and Zuko released his breath in a small sigh. “Did you need something?”  
  
“I was wondering if you’d like to spar.” Katara’s mind filled with images—Aang, spinning his fire, the burns on her hands, Kyoshi Island burning, the smoke clogging the air, her mother kneeling in front of Yon Rha, telling her to go find her father—  
  
Katara smiled. “Sure, why not?”  
  
She pulled her water back out and sunk into her stance, Zuko sliding into his own across from her. When it began, it wasn’t what she was expecting.  
  
It wasn’t like before, fighting for her life against the enemy. Even with his fire, she could not see him as anything but her friend, an ally. They danced, water and fire swirling around them in an intricate knot, never quite hitting each other.  
  
Katara is reminded of the dance she and Aang had performed at his dance party, but this is different. Their dance came from hours upon hours of practice, working through the same moves.  
This, this, she decides, is from hours upon hours of fighting, of running and hiding and learning, of seeing the boy with the scar over his eye and seeing the torture that makes him tick, the way he hides inside himself, locking away the good, of watching the pain melt away until all that is left is a boy with a scar and the naivete and compassion of a child.  
  
He has changed. So has she. The pain is gone, the hole filled with trust until all that is left is for her to swing around this boy and dance, dance under the coils of fire and steam above and around them.  
When they stop for the night, they are both panting, and she bends his sweat away with her own, and he gives her a smile, small and all her own, and she treasures it.

 

He helps with dinner. The fire is warm and the discussion from lunch returns full-force, something about peanut sauce and explosions and the advantages of being able to make explosives out of materials you might have on hand in captivity. Katara isn’t sure who would have peanut sauce in captivity, but she lets them argue, curling up on her blanket as everyone laughs and yells and eventually, finally, settles down for sleep.  
  
She yawns, exhausted, and slips underneath her blankets, hoping for better sleep. As she looks around one final time, she sees Zuko, stretched out on his own blankets, mouth slightly open, chest rising and falling in a clear pattern of sleep.  
  
If she, too, sleeps better that night—well. It’s not like anyone will notice.


End file.
